Sunday, September 23, 2007

ThingOne's marvellous adventures in France

We've been back a week now, but I wanted to note (mainly to jog my memory as we forget how ThingOne's developed in future) what ThingOne got up to on our holiday.

She developed a lot over the week. She had just started counting to ten before we left, and by the time we got back was pretty consistent with that and had learned colours too. She was telling anyone that was interested (or otherwise) what colour everything was.

We thought she'd be impressed with the plane journey there, since she always points out planes in the sky. As it was, she didn't seem all that interested. But she was VERY interested when a helicopter landed in a field right next to us on the short walk to the beach, and then took off again (as was I - it's always fun watching helicopters!) She was talking about the "helitoptop" for the rest of the week.

We seemed to spend a lot of our time running around the toilet block near our cabin/static caravan (it was the shower block too, but we called it the toilet block as we found it a funnier thing for ThingOne to plead us to take her to). It was a pretty majestic toilet block to be fair. The main things she liked were all the steps within the courtyard of the toilet block (told you it wasn't a grotty little block). By the time we came home she was much more proficient with steps, and we can now while away a good period of time playing on and around steps.

She developed in lots more ways which are harder for me to put my finger on. She suddenly seems a little more toddler and a little less baby. She still doesn't have an awful lot of hair, so people still often mistake her for a boy (or "garcon" while we were away), but we can really see her turning into a little girl in front of our eyes.

On Monday morning when I was about to return to work, ThingOne sat at the breakfast table saying, "ThingOne Daddy sandcastle, yeah?" and "ThingOne beach, yeah?" It broke our hearts to think that she thought life would be like that from now on, and now she had to face the harsh realities of back-to-normal. I felt bad for having to go to work and wanted to pull a sickie and spend more time with her.

(And I don't know where she's got this ending-every-question-with-"yeah" thing from. We'll have to put a stop to that.)